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Monday reads

Dead Cell’s weapon conversation over at Gamasutra is a good piece even if the type of game is a big turn off to me (difficulty levels are not my friend unless they have various shades of easy!). So many weapon choices (my FPS childhood taught me that one weapon per number key is probably optimum) and yet… The number of words gamers (and game designers) have available for use in combat is truly fascinating, and juxtaposes nicely with words for… the countryside over at the Guardian (old, but good) and makes me wonder what a game that used these words, and not the countless words the human world has built to describe pointy sticks and ammunition throwing things would look like (if it is, indeed, possible). It’s not dig at Dead Cell (which looks beautifiul and, by all accounts, looks like a great game with a lot of love behind it) but I find it interesting none-the-less to think of the effort put into the gaming dictionary and why the word list from gaming manuals would probably make for an awful corpus of text (should game manuals be the only text left after the end of the world/found by aliens trying to understand our culture).

On the technology front, I was intrigued by the idea of a “Smell Dectector” (concern that summer sun is getting the best of me is a regular feeling!) – and speaking of smelly, the news of SnapChat’s fight with Facebook continues: and reminds me that Facebook’s behavior is still pretty poor for a company that pushes heavily on it’s morale agenda (I expected more from a social network than traditional technology companies, but that’s probably just me being naive). Via LinkedIn, I came across a good piece exploring the challenges of the changing industry and the need for us to start thinking “post capitalism” and I can’t disagree that we need to build better foundations for the future rather than just carrying on relentlessly forward (there’s no need to stop progress, but it should be done with awareness at the same time). At least one tech news piece I read this morning had some positive progress – there’s some really nice features in the latest test editions of Windows Server.

Finally, the “how did this get past the editors” award goes to PC Gamers’ article on DNS servers – it’s worrying when the comments seem better structured and more technically accurate than the article itself.